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The Coen Brothers and “Le Vrai Courage”

February 22, 2011

That’s how Le Monde’s critic Thomas Sotinel translates “True Grit,” which opens in France tomorrow under its English title. In his review, he captures, with an unerring clarity, the filmmakers’ sharp political intentions, as in the way that they lionize its young heroine, Mattie Ross, yet rue her actions:

That innocence, inhabited by an inextinguishable thirst for vengeance, finds a stunning incarnation in Hailee Steinfeld. The Coen brothers … put the adolescent in impossible situations—for instance, making her climb to the top of a tree to bring down a hanged cadaver. This is no longer meant to shock or to provoke laughter; they do this because they respect and magnify this character of a child who wants to impose the law of God and of men on a land that had, until then, done without it. “True Grit” is a new expression of the history of the conquest of the West.

And he concludes with what is, indeed, the moral statement that the Coens intend to leave viewers with: “The price to pay for this debauch of energy, of violence, of crimes, and of thrills that was the conquest of the West, is the colorless puritanism of Midwestern America.” I don’t think the movie will win the Oscar for Best Picture—though it could benefit from a split between “The Social Network” and “The King’s Speech,” due to instant-runoff voting, the elaborate system of that the Academy now uses. Last year at this time Hendrik Hertzberg wrote about that system and its possible effect on the results—and he rightly predicted that “The Hurt Locker” could be its beneficiary:

Members—there are around fifty-eight hundred of them—are being asked to rank their choices from one to ten. In the unlikely event that a picture gets an outright majority of first-choice votes, the counting’s over. If not, the last-place finisher is dropped and its voters’ second choices are distributed among the movies still in the running. If there’s still no majority, the second-to-last-place finisher gets eliminated, and its voters’ second (or third) choices are counted. And so on, until one of the nominees goes over fifty per cent.

He explained that “Avatar” was “polarizing” whereas “few people who have seen ‘The Hurt Locker’—a real Iraq War story, not a sci-fi allegory—actively dislike it.” And that’s what happened. This year, “The Social Network”—the best of the nominees—is despised by many who simply can’t stand those darned kids, and “The King’s Speech” is derided by some who see it as dull and stodgy, whereas “True Grit” might well be lots of voters’ No. 2. Like “The Hurt Locker,” “True Grit” is political—and, like “The Hurt Locker,” “True Grit” hedges its politics, which is an inescapable aspect of its popularity.